"Reach(ing) out and touch(ing) someone" today, could mean almost anything. Methods for connecting people seem to outnumber effectiveness. It's what happens after the initial connection is made that counts.The challenges ahead seemingly need to focus on user behavior to exploit social media tools. These tools are effective and vary in delivery for business use. Their use also potentially shifts away from the original purpose. Then, crowd mentality also chances to set in to render marketing data useless.
Take babytel, a name that says a lot about this (new) industry. I installed their JAVA social app--Telephone for Facebook. It was painless, easy, FREE (read the conditions) and cool. Now my incentive was to hook my daughter into using "Telephone" since she and her friends already connect through Facebook. I had a spare microphone that I handed over to my daughter that she insisted on installing and going through the process on her own--all I could do is hope that she and her friends adopt the technology. Still, they continue to jabber up billable time on landlines since we live in an area that's known as a very grey LATA. These calls are mostly long distance inter-lata calls but not with Telephone for Facebook. It turns out that teenage girls prefer cell phones above dorky computer mics, but we're still holding out in this battle.
My buddy Julian Barrios at MX Logic (McAfee) introduced me to their hosted security services several years ago. Julian maintains a LinkedIn page that he uses to propel news briefs about security that he posts on the LinkedIn page that links back to the MX Logic website news feed. The tool LinkedIn uses is BlogLink by TypePad. This combination of tools is clever and effective because I often read the news posts that Julian writes and those posts take me to the MX Logic website. Has it changed anything? My confidence in MX Logic/McAfee remains "good" although McAfee's massive rebooting of PCs last week was interesting.
Facebook launched "Like" buttons to get a billion buttons installed so every website possible integrates with Facebook. The danger I see ahead for Facebook is clutter--1 billion Like buttons may sound impressive but when you review similar like and dislike buttons on Yahoo or other outlets they seem to wash one another out with equal voting on what readers agree with or dislike. According to the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), "credibility of the crowd" is a benefit of using social media for marketing. What isn't addressed is the "credibility" of "credibility of the crowd" and persuasive numbers to justify returns on investment.
As long as many of these tools remain free they perpetuate usage. Everyone wants an edge in marketing their company's wares and services but not everyone wants to pay for what they could do for free. Can social media companies carve out a niche that delivers more than just big numbers of users, with meaningful market metrics and quantifiable sales? Will these outlets or purveyors of "social connections" actually do more than promote communications and deliver reasonable returns? Are the metrics credible?
